The Poetry of Metamorphosis and the Prose of Sainthood: : Interpolated Verse Narrative in Tirso de Molina’s Deleitar Aprovechando

T H E P O E T R Y O F M E T A M O R P H O S I S A N D T H E P R O S E O F S A I N T H O O D : I N T E R P O L A T E D V E R S E N A R R A T I V E I N T I R S O D E M O L I N A ' S DELEITAR APROVECHANDO Christopher B. Weimer O k l a h o m a State University One of the more tempting challenges for poets in early modern Europe might havebeen the mythological narrative, tales of gods' and mortals' erotic doings, most often based on Ovid's Metamorphoses . Two of the better-known and frequently-studied of these poems in English were penned by authors whose modern reputations rest largely on their contributions to the theater: Marlowe's Hero and Leander and Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. Among those dramatists' Spanish counterparts , however, Tirso de Molina had much less success with his two Ovidian poems, the Fdbula de Mirra, Venus y Adonis and the Fdbula de Piramo y Tisbe, which have always received only scant attention from readers and scholars of Golden Age poetry. This neglect is due in large part to the fact that Tirso published both poems in his frequently maligned 1635 miscellany Deleitaraprovechando. In contrast to its predecessor, Tirso's 1624 collection of secular novellas and comedias entitled Los cigarrales de Toledo, Deleitaraprovechando instead contains saints' lives and autos sacramentales. Deleitar's greater piety and explicit moral seriousness offer what Margaret Wilson terms a "twist a lo divino of the familiar Boccaccian pattern" and the work represents "the prototype of the ascetic-novelistic collection , which makes its appearance in Spain as the spirit of desengaiio begins to prevail" (20). In his study of Tirso's prose works, Andre Nougue asserts: "Ainsi, le Deleytaraprovechando aura un caractere resolument devot et edifiant; vue sous cet angle, l'oeuvre de Tirso est nouvelle; les ouvrages des predecesseurs se contentaient surtout de divertir; Deleytaraprovechando divertira, certes, mais en instruisant" (210). Perhaps owing to this difference , Deleitar—with the exception of the sometimes-excerpted novella El bandolero, a biography of San Pedro Armengol—has never won the popularity or the respect that Tirso's original audiences as well as subsequent generations have to some extent accorded the more lighthearted Los cigarrales. It is therefore hardly surprising that few scholars have sought out or examined the two mythological verse narratives Tirso interpolates into the collection.1 Departing from the poems' tradition of neglect, this CALIOPE Vol. 6, Nos. 1-2 (2000): pages 167-178 168 «5 Christopher B. Weimer study will examine the Fdbula de Mirra, Venus y Adonis, focusing specifically on the first section of the poem-the account of Adonis's conception -and the uses to which Tirso puts this Ovidian narrative within the context of Deleitar aprovechando. As he did in Los cigarrales de Toledo, Tirso follows Boccaccio's model and places Deleitar aprovechando's constituent texts within a frame tale of noble friends in seclusion sharing stories—in the case of this collection, edifying narrations recounted while these pious aristocrats shun "las permisiones de las Carnestolendas" in Madrid (19). The Fdbula de Mirra, Venus y Adonis appears in the collection's first novella, a life of St. Thecla entitled La patrona de las musas which the "orador piadoso" Don Luis (188) recites to the assembled company on Sunday morning. Thecla, according to the apocryphal Acts of Paul and to Basil of Seleucia's verse biography, was converted as a young woman to Christianity by Paul's preaching. Thecla rejected marriage in favor of chastity in the service of God, a resolution sorely tested by the numerous foes and obstacles over which she invariably triumphed with the aid of miracles. Tirso, however, does not content himself with simply recounting Thecla's biography, spectacular though some of its events are, nor even with his transformation of one lecherous villain from his sources into a galdn smitten with the future saint. He instead begins La patrona...